The present invention relates to a method of assembling and installing a very large floating barge for example for processing gas or crude oil at sea.
After the gas or crude oil has been extracted, a product of this type requires numerous processing stages and large, heavy equipment and installations.
When the crude oil or gas is extracted at sea, this equipment and these installations are placed on floating storage or FPSO—Floating Production Storage and Offloading—units. This term refers to a ship or floating unit such as a barge used for production at sea. This type of floating unit receives the crude oil or gas extracted from the production location and stores and processes the production until a ship, such as a petrol tanker, can load it by means of a buoy situated some hundreds of meters from the floating unit and take the production to a port.
The floating unit also has numerous systems for processing and separating the different types of crude oil or gas and accommodation units, together with a dynamic positioning system when weather conditions are unfavourable.
The largest floating units produced are about 310 meters long, about 60 meters wide and about 30 meters high. They may have a production capacity of over 200,000 barrels a day and a storage capacity of 2 million barrels.
At the moment, very large floating units cannot be built at existing construction sites.
In fact, construction sites for these floating units have dry docks and quays of limited capacity which do not allow the construction of very long hulls over 310 meters long or very wide hulls over 60 meters wide.